Señors at Scale - Software Engineering & Tech Leadership · Dan Neciu

Racing Software at Scale

·48 min·2 clips

A full-course-yellow countdown showed 1,800 instead of 10 minutes before a race in Malaysia.

Jorge did not set out to write motorsports software. He finished university, wanted a change, moved to the UK, and gave himself two weeks in Birmingham to land any software engineering job he could find. Timing Solutions turned into the place he stayed for nearly a decade. The work pulled him into timing systems, data collection, analytics, and race control software, where milliseconds are not a nice-to-have detail. Dan keeps the conversation grounded. It starts with how Jorge found the field, then gets into what breaks when racing software has to survive a live event. React was not friendly at first. Jorge remembers opening the frontend code and seeing a wall of text, not a tidy system inviting him in. He learned by changing small pieces. That got serious when the frontend developer left in January and the product had already been promised for April. The stack was only part of the problem. The harder part was the gap between every scenario a team can imagine and the live environment that appears once the event is actually running. That is the catch. You can plan for failure, keep asking what can go wrong, and still get surprised when the real event behaves a little differently. This year went cleanly in production. Jorge says the production was flawless, but he still brings up a near catch during the first GT Asia round in Malaysia. The example has some bite. A full course yellow means there is an incident on track: the race continues, drivers stay out, everyone drops to 80 kph, and nobody overtakes until the incident is cleared. There was countdown behavior involved too. That small control detail makes the stakes plain. This is not abstract backend plumbing. It is information drivers need to trust right away. Dan closes by bringing it back to coding during racing events, and Jorge sounds amused, relieved, and pleased to have talked through the mess of it.

As heard by us

A practical race-day software story about timing, pressure, and systems that cannot miss.

This episode keeps its attention on software built for racing at scale: timing systems, data capture, and analytics for events where every millisecond counts. Jorge Cuchu's path into the work comes through cleanly.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a real-world story about software where every millisecond matters.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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